True. Having learned a couple of other languages I can, however, place myself in the shoes of a non-native or less fluent speaker, and, to them, these words sound pretty much the same. It's like me with Chinese, it all sounds the same right now.
So, "lose" should really be spelled "looze", "looz" or some variant of that. Writing "lose" and pronouncing it \ˈlüz\ makes as much sense as writing "lost" and pronouncing it \ˈlüzt\.
Not to be pedantic, but they are not pronounced the same in American English.
http://www.englishpage.net/showthread.php?10393-Pronunciatio...